The Creators

4

The figures of the man and the girl drew closer. They were holding hands and walking. Jasmine asked Jacinth and JaJa to stay concealed in the bushes. Softly, she stepped out in the moonlight as the couple gazed at the moon together facing the sea. She went and stood behind them and cleared her throat. They turned around, surprised, and the girl screamed: “ Who are you?”

Jasmine said: “Shh…! Do not be scared. I come in peace.” The boy held the girl closer wrapped in his arms as if he was sheltering her from the unknown and fierce. The girl had bright red hair and looked very like Jacinth, except for her bubbly hair and skin coloring, which was pink like the others of her dimension.

Jacinth was dusky with hazel eyes and dark blond streaked hair. Jasmine was taller and frailer looking than the others. She was pale with violet eyes and jet black hair.

“Are you Jolyn?” she asked.

“ How does that matter?” said the boy gruffly. He had blue-black bubbles for hair and was very tall.

“Have you been getting dreams of walking on clouds and writing poetry about the moon?” asked Jasmine.

“ How do you know?” asked Jolyn. “Who are you anyway and why is your hair and color so strange?”

“ Do you believe in a life beyond your dimension? I come from another dimension. I know you are Jolyn. I am Jasmine.”

“Why are you so pale? How is it you look like Jolyn?” asked the man.

“You could call me Jolyn’s replicate from another dimension. There are a number of us in various dimensions. I come from the creator’s dimension. The police there is chasing me and it will eventually try to catch all my different forms from different dimension and put us in captivity. I have done nothing wrong except asked for privacy and freedom to choose. I am collecting all my replicates to set up a new home in a new dimension. The mind police would be looking for me in various dimensions. They do not know of Jolyn’s existence as yet but will get to know eventually if you do not come away with me.”

“Why should we trust you?”

“ I can show you two more of our replicates from other dimensions if that helps convince you. They are with me and behind those bushes.”

“Jacinth. JaJa come out,” called out Jasmine.

Jacinth and JaJa peered out and walked towards the three at the beach.

“That is truly unbelievable,” said Jolyn. “You both look like me a little bit and yet are so different. And what is this?” she asked pointing at JaJa and looking disgusted.

JaJa was staring open-mouthed and drooling.

“That is JaJa from the golliwog’s dimension. She is also our replicate. But, she speaks no English. Jacinth and I do,” said Jasmine. “Please do not regard JaJa as inferior as she is one of the smartest in her dimension and can communicate telepathically with me!”

“What is telepathy?” asked Jolyn.

“ When you can communicate just with the mind without using voices or gestures,” replied Jasmine.

“Please come with us,” said Jacinth.

JaJa squeezed herself between Jacinth and Jasmine, who were standing next to each other. She looked in askance at the new couple. She sensed the newcomers did not want to accept her.

“Why do we all need to go together? We could confuse them if we are spread out all over,” said the man.

“ The mind police functions differently,” said Jasmine. “ They can read thought waves. If we are together and thinking on the same lines, it is easier for us to create a new dimension, a secret hideout to lead our lives safely and to create a new inter-species dimension. The mind police maynot come in person for my replicates but introduce nightmares of death and lead them to either suicide caused by depression and a sense of hopelessness or death by accident. If we are all together and our minds are in sync dreaming of survival and a new world, it will be impossible for them to inject negative and destructive ideas into our dreams or our minds. I have been projecting to you dreams of rainbows and writing poetry about the moon as I know you like to write poetry. Also none of you except JaJa and me can sense others thoughts. That only happens when you open your mind. I know Jacinth is trying but it is not that easy.”

“Well, she is not wrong you know,” said Jolyn turning her head towards the man.“ I have had nightmares for the past two days in which I saw us dying in a blaze. I have also felt a need to cry and have felt life is senseless. Could it be the mind police? And I have had the other positive dreams because of which you brought me to the beach today to cheer me up so that I have only good dreams.”

“Block your mind. Think of JaJa, not of us,”said Jasmine.” And let us make a run for it so that if they return with their negative thoughts to the bubbleverse, they will find not find your mind. They will be confused. Perhaps they will think that you have taken your life…”

“ I will only come if you let Gorge accompany us and if he agrees to come. He is my husband and we are pledged together in life,” said Jolyn clinging to the man. “Here men must lead and women follow. I will go by Gorge’s decision.”

Gorge looked at her and said, “ It seems a bit bizarre to me.”

“Please try to understand. The thought police will try to eradicate my replicates and me as well for daring to think different. They are very different and do things with the power of the mind. If they get to Jolyn, you might get to a day when you wake up and find she has disappeared. If they are really upset with my thoughts, they will eventually wipe all beings that could think along my lines, as my replicates could. They will no longer just wipe memories and let us be but they will physically vaporize us so that our minds freed from our bodies eventually lose our sense of bearing and become only a part of the universal consciousness in the creator’s zone,” Jasmine paused for breath. “In short, Jolyn could be killed as could the rest of us. Please, please listen to me.”

Gorge looked confused. “Let me think,” he said. Gorge was not very convinced. For him to give up his life for a strange story from a strange creature was a bit difficult culturally. In the bubbleverse, it was a men’s world. Women depended on men.

“There is no time to think,” said Jacinth. “Do you not understand? Please help save Jolyn and all of us.”

“Well, if it is a matter of life and death, I suppose I had better give in. Still it sounds bizarre. I didnot know there were creatures from other worlds inhabiting the Earth. As far as I knew and studied, it was only us!” said Gorge. “Where are your husbands? Why are they not with you to give substance to your strange words?”

“In our dimensions, women are independent. They can opt to marry or not marry and lead lives where we make up our own minds. Please do come with us. Jolyn has unexplored abilities, as do you. Let us create a new world to discover them. Please,” said Jasmine.

“All right. We will come… though we might return if we are not convinced. Where and how do we go?”

“Great. We pinge to Jamie’s dimension,” said Jasmine.

“ Who is Jamie and what is pinge?” asked Gorge.

“Jamie is another replicate. He is a boy in a post Third World War dimension in a new country called Aurica. We will go to him because he lives in a very bleak world and will give in to the tortures of the mind police more easily than others,” said Jasmine. “ And I will explain pinging to you in a minute.”

“There was a Third World War?” asked Jacinth.

“ Yes. In Jamie’s dimension the United Nations failed completely. There was a war over oil and weapons.”

“Well. It will be good to have another male to help lead. Should we pack our clothes and papers and come back here ‪tomorrow?” asked Gorge.

“Oh dear! No! We must leave because the mind police is already at our heels. So, we must run now. Do not worry about anything else,” explained Jasmine.

Gorge looked stunned but he was listening. Jolyn was whimpering a little with fear. He patted her and said, “Don’t worry honey. We will be all right. Let us just go along with this lady. As I have said we will return if this is some kind of a hoax and I will see to it that these creatures are dealt with with firmness. So, how do we go?”

“Like this… By pinging ,” replied Jasmine. She again took the tong out of her backpack as JaJa scrambled onto her shoulders.

“ Please hold on to me tightly all of you as we pinge to Jamie’s world,” said Jasmine.

Jacinth, Jolyn and Gorge held onto her shoulders tightly and JaJa sat on her shoulders. Jasmine clapped the tongs and they heard a ping and felt themselves swirled through flashes of lights, sound and darkness. They were born on a strong draft of wind and squeezed till they landed in a world with a grey sky!

Jolyn and Gorge started to cough and splutter. Jacinth was finding it difficult to breathe. Her eyes were stinging from the pollutants in the air. Jasmine and JaJa were coughing too. Quickly, Jasmine pulled out a box from her bagpack and gave everyone a mask. “Put these on. The air is very polluted here.”  She gave Jolyn and Gorge two shower cap like head gears too so that their hair would not be affected by the pollutants either and they would not look different from other residents of Aurica.

“That was sudden and quick!! What next?” asked a surprised Gorge adjusting his cap and mask.

 

 

The Creators

2

The mind police was in a quandary. They could not locate Jasmine. She had blocked them off completely. The mind police never chased a person physically but studied the thought waves and found the people. Then they pinged to the person, accosted him by surprise, gave a whiff of chloroform to the truant and pinged them back to their own reality to decide on the course of action. If the truant had just lost touch unintentionally, then they would just send them to the correctional facility. They would be re-trained. If they showed signs of rebellion, they would wipe out their memories with a flash of the memory eraser and take them back to the dimension from where they had been brought in as a baby.

Jasmine was an issue. She had a mission and a vision at an inappropriate age. She did not fit into any of the dimensions that existed. At twenty, she had a vision of a new reality. That is what the councillors did at three hundred!

Mankind was not ready for a multi-dimensional existence, not just mankind but even the other species. Take the fluffy, harmless looking golliwogs for instance. They lived in jungles and growled at and bit anyone who went near the hordes of chocolate they had plucked from trees. They loved it when their candy floss clouds rained sweet syrups which filled their pools. They were always high on sugar and never slept. That was a strange dimension… No one was quite clear why and how it existed.

The mind police were wondering if they should check out Jasmine in different realities. There was the dimension where she had remained with her parents and would have grown up to be a writer called Jacinth. Of course, Jacinth was about a decade older than the Jasmine.

Jacinth looked at the girl at the gate and smiled, “Come in,”she said. “How strange that you should have the same name as my character in this story! What is that on your shoulder? Is it some kind of a toy?”

“ No. It is a golliwog,” said Jasmine as she walked towards Jacinth.

The mind police had never looked at Jacinth beyond the time they had got hold of Jasmine more than two decades ago. They didnot know her thought patterns. She would be difficult to trace in the chaos of minds. The mind police knew that Jasmine came from a reality where the parents had suddenly lost their baby in a crowded book fair. The baby had been pinged to the councillors as they had identified Jacinth as a powerful creative mind. They did not want to lose such a dynamic force. Her name had been changed to Jasmine so that she would not be recognized in her own original dimension if she ever went back. They knew she would have to travel to different dimension when she was studying for her councillorship. They did have to visit multiple realities to study the need for thinking and how thought could be materialized.

What nobody foresaw was that Jasmine would never want to be part of a collective consciousness but would want an individuality beyond the needs of the creative dimension.

In the creative dimension, thought was common property. There were no copyrights. A consciousness existed not only among the living but also among the inanimate objects. A rock and a plant were as much a part of the collective mind as were people’s thoughts.

Jasmine sat down on the chair Jacinth pulled out for her. “Thanks,” she said. The golliwog jumped onto the table and grabbed some candy that lay in a small basket on the table. She started chanting and eating on the table. Jacinth looked on perturbed.

“What is that?” she asked.

“ That is a golliwog, a creature from another dimension. She is called JaJa.”

At the sound of her name, the creature started singing in a strange language and gurgling.

Jacinth found her peculiar but she was an open and tolerant individual so she put up with JaJa quietly. Jasmine, an adept mind reader, could see the struggle in Jacinth’s mind. She knew all about Jacinth. Jacinth knew nothing about her.

Jasmine said, “I am going to ask you a bunch of questions that sound peculiar but you must answer them so that I can tell you who I am.”

Jacinth felt she was in a dream.

“Do you believe in a multiverse?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Jacinth.

“Are you getting strange colourful dreams about walking on clouds and people fleeing?”

“Yes. I am. But how would you know that?”

“You will understand by and by. For, the time being please believe me when I say I am you in another dimension. I know we have more selves in the multiverse. JaJa is a version of us from a more primitive dimension. She lives on candy and syrup.”

Jacinth was staring at Jasmine and JaJa open-mouthed!

“Please listen carefully. The mind police from my dimension is trying to catch me. I am not a felon but I think different. Sooner or later they will look for me in your home. Right now, they are probably trying to track your thought waves. You need to continue focussing on JaJa and not me. They do not know JaJa exists. They only know of you and me and they have lost track of you. Does all that make sense?”

“Kind of…More like fiction…”replied Jacinth.

“ It is the reality. We need to pinge out of your dimension and to our bubbleself’s dimension to avoid detection. The mind police is not aware of the bubble universe because it keeps drifting and is difficult to access. Right now, just trust me. Hold on to my arm when I clap the tongs. And whatever happens don’t let go.”

Jasmine again placed JaJa on her shoulder.

Jacinth was ever ready for an adventure and agreed. Everything seemed like out of a dream or a racy fiction for her.

Jasmine took out what looked like an oversized tong from her knapsack and clapped the tongs. Jacinth was holding on to her and JaJa too. She heard a strange ping and then she felt herself move through a whirl of air and kaleidoscopic light and emerge into a strange blue sphere. She could see a giant bubble floating, or rather hopping. She felt their trio rush through the air and land inside the bubble with a ping.